Accelerating ABM Impact: The Case for a Blended Approach 

Driving Growth with Three Types of ABM: How Companies are Leveraging ABM for Maximum Business Impact 

Optimizing ABM Impact: Planning for 2018 and Beyond 

Lessons from ABM Leaders: Juniper, Microsoft, and Teradata 

ABM for Key Accounts: Moving “Up” from a One-to-Many Approach 

The Three R’s of ABM 

Scaling ABM Without Losing the Magic 

Collaborative ABM: Innovating with Key Accounts to Drive Strategic Growth 

ABM for Critical Clusters: Driving Growth with a One-to-Few Approach 

Account-Based Marketing Examples Worth Implementing:

1. Engaging Your Target Accounts With Educational Content
2. Sending Personalized Emails To Target-Account Contacts
3. Leveraging Social Media To Engage Target Accounts…Tactfully
4. Working With Partners To Engage Your Target Accounts
5. Implementing A Smart Account-Based Direct Mail Campaign
6. Hosting Events Specifically For Your Target Accounts

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a powerful technique to deliver targeted and personalized engagements to customers in key accounts.  ABM Leadership Alliance’s recent research report shows that B2B marketers who adopt ABM can expect a 171% uplift in annual contract value – so perhaps it’s no wonder that according to data by Constellation Research, 92% of companies plan to implement an ABM strategy in 2017.

However, according to the same stud, it appears that despite overwhelming evidence of the revenue growth opportunity presented by ABM, many companies aren’t entirely unconvinced of its successful execution or whether they will achieve a satisfactory return on investment. Why is this?

That old nemesis of scalability seems to be the primary cause of concern.

3 Takeaways for Evolving Your Account-Based Sales Strategy with AI

Consider replacing lead capture forms with intelligent chat bots.
Set up personalized welcome messages for target accounts.
Include links that trigger chat bot conversations in your outbound emails.

Vainu, a SaaS sales platform that tracks and stores crucial open data on 108 million companies worldwide, now seamlessly integrates with the most recognized and widely used CRM, Salesforce.

With a U.S. database and ones across Europe in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, the company is constantly leveraging open data and AI to improve the sales process for thousands of salespeople who already use the software. The Salesforce integration adds to other useful sales and workflow tools, including Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics, LinkedIn, Slack, Gmail and more.

7 Evaluation Questions to Help Find the Right ABM Technologies for Your Organization:

1. Can It Help Identify Key Accounts and Decision-Makers?
2. Can It Help Reach Target Accounts?
3. Can It Help Us Engage Key Decision-Makers?
4. Can It Help Us Manage Account Data?
5. Does It Have Native Integrations with my MAP and CRM?
6. Does It Fill More than One Marketing Need?
7. What Do We Need to Make This System Work for ABM?

You spend time, money and a lot of effort driving your highest valued accounts to your website. But when those VIP leads get to your site you force them to fill out forms. That’s like having a neon “open” sign on your storefront but a padlock on the front door.

Instead, roll out the red carpet for your dream customers by greeting them with a personalized message using Drift ABM.

Most B2B agency marketers say their firm is using an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. See detailed research findings for ABM use by digital, general marketing, or advertising agencies.

KickFire, the leader in IP address intelligence and company identification technology, announced that it has partnered with Metadata, a leader in intelligent B2B demand generation, to enable B2B marketers to optimize marketing spend and reduce customer acquisition costs.

Metadata’s intelligent demand automation platform generates ‘look-alike’ prospects and matches profiles of ideal customers with multi-channel targeted advertising campaigns. Utilizing KickFire’s IP address-to-company identification technology, Metadata customers are now able to increase identification of companies across its multivariate, account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

Here are a few actionable tips to help B2B marketing leaders improve their demand generation strategies for existing clients.

1) Refine your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. There is no question ABM is redefining B2B marketing. While some B2B marketers are using ABM to better target new business, most are still getting their heads around this B2B marketing trend. Marketers looking for more revenue should ensure they enhance their target account lists with offers for relevant products and services to existing clients.

2) Be smarter with analytics. While many marketing leaders have data and the analytics at their disposal, most aren’t leveraging them effectively. Marketing leaders need to get a better handle on their customer data, targeting key accounts and using better analysis to identify opportunities for growth. For example, marketing leaders need to look for opportunities to cross-sell more products to existing clients or look for upsell opportunities. By mining purchase patterns and content consumption history, marketers can unearth new insights that they can leverage for more business.

3) Better align sales, marketing and technology. Alignment between sales and marketing in B2B organizations can be an elusive goal. One of the biggest challenges for sales and marketing usually centers on lead quality. But, this is where technology can help, if used properly. Thanks to improved demand generation through ABM and multichannel marketing, marketing and sales can better define leads from the beginning – and improve lead quality and sales conversation. Applied to existing clients properly, this can be a path to more revenue thorugh better collaboration between sales professionals and marketers.

Key customer insights impact every stage of ABM success, from selecting and targeting the right accounts, to gathering information about the issues they face and the key contacts with whom you should connect, to designing an engagement plan that leverages the relative strengths of marketing and sales to (finally) orchestrating interactions with those accounts in a personalized, relevant manner. The bad news? Account-based marketing is not a silver bullet.

Despite the hype, marketers are achieving ABM success slowly; 64% of B2B marketing executives and professionals are just beginning, haven’t started, or have no plans for ABM programs.

To be customer-obsessed, marketers must go beyond firmographics, demographics, and a smattering of insight from your internal databases to really understand what makes their customers tick. Customer-obsessed firms foster stronger customer relationships by developing not only the tools, data, and processes to better understand customers — but the insight to demonstrate empathy and the cultural belief that obsession is essential to their success. And it pays off: Customer-Obsessed B2B firms are twice as likely to enjoy loyal customer relationships and see revenue growth in excess of 10% in the last fiscal year.

Other surveys conclude that although a minority have implemented an ABM approach so far, a bigger percentage of respondents intend to use it in the immediate future.  More recent findings from Econsultancy and Act-On show that while just 20% of global B2B marketers polled in May 2017 reported using ABM as a marketing automation method, another 53% had plans to use it soon.

However, two other studies reveal more conservative figures: A Q4 2016 Marketo survey found that just 34% of marketers in North America said they have adopted ABM; a March 2017 Leadspace survey, commissioned by the Martech Industry Council, found only 25.5% of US B2B marketers using ABM as a marketing technology.

ABM planning is more than just a list of target accounts. Learn the 10 key steps to planning a successful ABM initiative.

Demandbase on Thursday added self-service capabilities and additional artificial intelligence tools to its account-based marketing platform, promising an easier way for companies to find the right people, set up and manage campaigns.

Focused on targeting, engagement and conversion, the latest Demandbase ABM will include integrations from more than 50 other martech tools and streamline the process of bringing in data from sources such as CRM, the company said. This includes the ability to automatically select the right display ads for a particular account, for example, ways to optimize web sites and forms and deliver relevant data to sales development reps.

1. Always Start With Total Available Market (TAM)

2. Prioritize TAM By Market Segments Based On Existing Customer Success

3. Use Predictive Analytics Tools And Intelligent Data Sources To Identify Accounts Most Likely To Buy And/Or To Be In-Market 

4. Match Data And MarTech Up With Your Sales Team’s Wish List 

5. Drill Into Decision-Maker Personas Within Target Accounts

Key findings from the report include:

Business Benefits

• B2B marketers are finding great success with all three types of ABM: 87% of companies say ABM delivers higher ROI than other types of marketing
• ABM is a long-term game; business results improve with experience
• The benefits of ABM extend across all of marketing, and beyond: ABM influences all of marketing and is playing an important role in making companies more client centric

Budgets and Investment

• Companies implementing ABM are spending an average of 26% of the total marketing budget on the approach, and 72% of companies are planning to increase ABM spending
• The average ABM spending increase for 2017 was 23.5%
• Companies implementing One-to-One ABM have the most diverse sources of funding, often receiving support from corporate marketing, field marketing, and sales

Campaign Tactics

• ABM-ers work closely with Sales in all three types of ABM to develop “plays” and integrated campaigns
• Companies focused on One-to-One and One-to-Few are most likely to invest in account-specific thought leadership, but practitioners of all three types are balancing digital engagement with live events, briefings, and roadshows; offline continues to play an essential role
• Top challenges include developing assets that can be mass customized at scale, and personalizing and tailoring marketing for key contacts at each account

Tools and Technology

• We’re still early in the adoption of ABM-focused systems and technology; most ABM-ers rely primarily on core marketing systems including CRM, marketing automation, and digital advertising
• Roughly one third of organizations have adopted more specialized tools to support their programs, such as lead to account matching, website personalization, and predictive analytics, but these types of tools top the list for planned investment over the next 12-18 months
• The push to scale ABM programs is driving a great deal of investment: ABM-ers look to new tools and technologies most often to help cover more accounts, automate processes, and improve online customer engagement

"For the most part they do differ.

1. Inbound marketing starts when a visitor looks for your content. An account-based approach requires you to go out into the world and talk to your ideal prospect directly, not wait for them to appear.
2. Typically deal sizes will be larger for ABM than inbound marketing.
3. Despite technological advances, ABM is still limited in scale versus inbound marketing so typically there will be a larger number of deals.

The right approach clearly depends on who your company sells to. Obviously you are a company selling to businesses, but an account-based approach, even one using the latest techniques, does not work if the average lifetime value of your largest clients is small. In this scenario an inbound marketing approach is still the best approach."

New ABM Readiness Scorecard helps you determine whether account-based marketing is right for your B2B marketingn team and business.